Sir Robert Clarke
Shrewd chairman of United Biscuits and Thames Water
SIR ROBERT CLARKE, who has died aged 88, was chairman of United Biscuits, Thames Water and the trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Bob Clarke was essentially a marketing specialist, and a manager with a human touch who believed that a company should have a moral concern for its staff as well as its shareholders. Having begun his career at Cadbury, in 1974 he became a director of United Biscuits.
Quiet but shrewd, Clarke became a loyal right-hand man to UB’S flamboyant chairman Hector (later Lord) Laing, of whom he once said: “He’s the sort of man that most people would die for 90 per cent of the time, and the other 10 per cent of the time they could kill him.” When Laing threw tantrums, Clarke found it best to “treat him exactly as you would a child”.
As a managing director from 1977 and chief executive from 1986 to 1990, Clarke supported Laing in a long phase of expansion. Milestones included the takeover of the chocolate maker Terry’s of York in 1982, the launch of Mcvitie’s Hobnob biscuits in 1985, a failed bid for the Imperial brewing and tobacco group in 1986 and the acquisition of the frozen seafood business Ross Young in 1988.
Clarke succeeded as chairman in 1990, when Laing became life president. At its peak in 1991, UB achieved £3 billion of annual sales and more than £200 million in profits, but business conditions had begun to deteriorate and the latter part of Clarke’s five-year tenure was marked by retrenchment.
Robert Cyril Clarke was born on March 28 1929 and educated at Dulwich College. After National Service in the Royal West Kent Regt, he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read History.
In 1952 he joined Cadbury Bros, attracted by the chocolate company’s ethical principles, and started work on the same day as its future chairman (Sir) Adrian Cadbury. After initial training, Clarke’s first job was to manage a chain of sweetshops; in 1957 he became marketing director of Cadbury Confectionery, and from 1962 to 1971 he was in charge of the group’s foray into an increasingly overcrowded market for packaged cakes.
Rationalisation led to a joint venture with United Biscuits, and when that came to an end in 1974, Clarke moved to UB rather than returning to Cadbury.
Having joined the board of Thames Water ahead of its 1989 privatisation, Clarke was its chairman from 1994 to 1999 and took a management role from 1996 to 1998 while the company was without a chief executive. At a time when privatised water utilities were in the media spotlight for rising charges and perceived failures to maintain pipes and reservoirs, successive rises in Clarke’s salary brought criticism.
On one occasion a tabloid newspaper sent a team to spy on the modest Clarke home, hoping to spot a breach of a hosepipe ban. Finding a scruffily dressed gardener at work, they probed for negative stories about his employer – but the gardener turned out to be Clarke himself.
Robert Clarke was knighted in 1993. Throughout the 1990s he lent his time to the development of Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, serving as chairman of its Special Trustees and a member of its trust board; he was closely involved with the Wishing Well appeal, which eventually raised
£54 million.
He also sat on a number of food industry bodies, and was a governor of the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Clarke’s pastimes included “renovating old buildings”: one such was the family farmhouse which he worked on at weekends for many years. Another was Drayton Hall, a dilapidated 18th century mansion at West Drayton which he had restored and extended as a handsome headquarters for United Biscuits.
He married in 1952 Evelyn (Lynne) Harper, who survives him with their three sons and a daughter.
Sir Robert Clarke, born March 28 1929, died June 1 2017